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Are your financial advisors spending 70% of their time searching for and reconciling data about customers and products and only 30% of their time on revenue generating activities such as making relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers to clients? Many of our financial services customers were experiencing this problem, which impeded them from achieving their strategic objectives.
Our solution more than doubled the productivity of 16,000 financial advisors resulting in over $50 million impact annually. They are now making tailored cross-sell and up-sell offers, expanding share of wallet, and increasing revenue. They are accurately measuring customer value, better aligning service levels and increasing profits.
How have these institutions been able to achieve these results? The linchpin was overcoming the barriers of account-centric systems and enabling desktop access to a customer-centric view.
Due to the size and complexity of these institutions, the financial advisors were unable to identify which clients had which products. Therefore, they could not determine the next relevant product to offer or compile list of targets for cross-sell and up-sell marketing campaigns. In addition, they were unable to accurately measure each client’s value to the institution. Because of this, they were not confident about the level of service they were delivering to each client.
The root cause of these business problems is the data, which is created, updated, and changed every day in multiple applications used by thousands of individuals across different lines of business, divisions, and departments. These financial services executives recognized the benefits of adopting a customer-centric approach. Yet existing account-centric systems prevented them from doing it.
Bill Bradway, Managing Director, Bradway Research LLCexplains the barriers for the IT team, “Most approaches to operationalizing customer centricity in point-to-point integration environments fail to meet expectations. Costs increase exponentially when IT needs to create customized retrieval of customer and product data from each data source. This problem is magnified when data is duplicated among numerous disparate applications, systems and data sources. As a result of the associated cost and complexity, many financial institutions are prevented from pursuing and capitalizing on the growth opportunities of successfully operationalizing customer centricity.”
So, what did these successful financial services institutions do differently? They operationalized customer centricity while maximizing investments in existing applications by implementing Siperian’s Customer Centricity Solution. Through their custom CRM application, the IT team at one of the world’s largest financial institutions enabled access to Siperian’s Extended Customer View. These financial advisors now have desktop access to a single customer view and visibility into valuable, but untapped family, business and employee relationships. By allowing easy access to these information assets, these financial service firms are delivering relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers and providing more tailored loyalty-building service.
With the New Year dawning I wanted to look back at some industry trends from the past twelve months, and then look at ahead at what we’re likely to see in 2010. So, this week: recap. Next week: predictions.
“Multidomain MDM” Goes Mainstream
From its inception MDM was meant to be “multidomain” – a solution for multiple data types. This stood in contrast to CDI or PIM, each of which focuses on a single domain. But with CDI morphing into “MDM for Customer Data” and PIM to “MDM for Product Data,” the terminology got a bit muddled. Hence the somewhat redundant “multidomain MDM” came into common usage in 2009 to differentiate it from single-domain MDM. As we saw with the Gartner numbers that I reviewed in my last post, the obvious benefits of managing all domains via a single platform, easier maintenance, and the advantages of leveraging existing investments, are spurring increased adoption. Still, confusion remained over multidomain MDM in the last year, not just with terminology, but also with capabilities. I addressed this in a late November post, but to reiterate: It’s not just about the data model, a true multidomain MDM hub has to be able to model, cleanse, match and relate.
Proactive Data Governance Takes Root
Many IT decision-makers came to the realization in 2009 that reactive data governance is bad because it is not responsive to real-time business needs. Business users increasingly demanded real-time data availability and data stewards worked to put proactive data governance into place to meet these demands. My friend Dan Power covered this topic earlier this year, showing that authoring data directly in an MDM hub enables firms to decouple data entry from traditional CRM and ERP systems, and establish the hub as both the System of Entry and the System of Record.
Taking Aim At The Reference Data Problem
Early on in 2009 we started seeing a lot of customer activity around the “reference data problem” and that interest remained strong through the year. To quickly summarize: certain business processes, order-to-cash for instance, oftentimes use three or more different systems interacting with each other to complete the loop. If their “look-up code” data isn’t standardized (one uses “USA” the second “U.S.” the third “United States”) problems ensue. As a category, reference data is similar to, though distinct from, master data. Yet the similarities are such that effective MDM solutions are perfect for solving the reference data problem. My colleague Manish Sood blogged on this topic in detail here and here.
Be sure to come back next week to see our bold predictions for 2010!
Just this week, leading research firm Gartner, Inc. published its 2010 predictions for MDM. There is one prediction related to multidomain MDM that I found particularly interesting. It mentions that the number of companies shopping for multidomain MDM solutions has increased. Now, why is that?
To get some insight into MDM purchasing and implementation trends, we simply need to look at companies that began their MDM journey in the past five years, especially those companies that started off with a single domain, such as customer data. Many of these MDM pioneers have since expanded their implementation to other domains such as finished products, materials, price, employees, and so on. But how did they do that? By using the same multidomain MDM platform? Or by separately implementing distinct single-domain MDM applications, such as one for customer data and another for product data?
Gartner contends that no vendor has a comprehensive multidomain MDM technology that handles all different industry use cases using different data domains. A true statement if you are purchasing an “MDM application.” Similar to packaged applications, like ERP or CRM which manage back-office or front-office operations, purpose-built “MDM applications” that focus on a single data domain for a certain industry can, in fact, only handle use cases that are specific to that data domain. So, Gartner is right in saying that a customer that uses “MDM applications” will have to work with different MDM vendors and technologies.
However, this should not be the case if you use an “MDM platform.” We can think about the situation as similar to database or web server technology; these technologies are pretty horizontal and flexible enough to address just about any use case in any industry. In the same way, a multidomain “MDM platform” is flexible enough to accommodate any data domain, and has the ability to cleanse, enrich, match, merge, and display data relationships across multiple domains.
What I don’t agree with in the Gartner predictions is the statement that only large vendors will provide “stronger” multidomain MDM. In my experience, these vendors are largely packaged application vendors, and coming from that heritage, they currently sell different single-domain “MDM applications.” While they talk up “multidomain MDM,” their customer base tells a different story – they have to use multiple distinct MDM applications because no single MDM application can accommodate diverse use cases involving different data domains. In contrast, Siperian has customers in different verticals using our multidomain “MDM platform” to manage multiple data domains on the same platform. Our customers don’t need different “MDM applications” because they’re fully capable of implementing multidomain MDM on their single Siperian platform.
Stay tuned for my forthcoming blog discussing the differences between the “MDM application” and “MDM platform” approaches for cross-industry, multidomain MDM use cases.
In the meantime, what do you think?
The current hot topic in the MDM space is multidomain master data management. And rightly so, as multidomain MDM has the potential to drive far more value for companies than limited single-domain MDM initiatives (aka CDI, PIM) that focus on a specific class of data such as customer or product.
We’ve heard interesting discussions that multidomain MDM is just about storing the multiple domains within the data model. That is a major misinterpretation. While it’s certainly true that you need to have a data model that’s flexible enough to accommodate multiple data domains (e.g. product, customer, supplier), the data model itself is not the be-all and end-all of multidomain MDM. It’s a requisite starting point, sure, but you need to be able to do so much more. For instance, the ability to match and merge data across various domains is extremely important. Same goes for data cleansing.
Think of it this way: you’re using a dedicated PIM system. It does a great job of matching data fields in ways that are very valuable in addressing problems with product-centric aspects of your business: supply chain, inventory management, etc. Can this system do a good job matching and merging data fields from multiple domains? Can it provide the kind of data cleansing capabilities you’d need if you wanted to incorporate customer data?
A true multidomain MDM hub will provide out-of-the-box capability to:
- • model any data domains
- • cleanse, correct, standardize, and enrich all types of data
- • match the different types of data and merge them into a single source of truth
- • relate across the different types data: customer-to-product, vendor-to-material, contact-to-organization, employee-to-location, etc.
To top it all, the data governance application should support the creation, consumption, management, and monitoring of all these types of data.
So to realize the promised value of multidomain MDM, you’ll need a proven multidomain MDM hub and a data governance application that supports all these capabilities.
Now that we’re back in the office from last week’s Siperian’s 5th user conference, it’s apparent that the event was quite a success. The two days went quick, which says to me that we got the format, presentations and atmosphere right. There was a lot of enthusiastic response to the technical tracks, and with 270 people, this was our largest user conference, ever!
I wrote in a previous post that multidomain MDM was emerging as Topic A at the conference, and that was definitely the case. John Radcliffe’s keynote addressed it and several customers gave presentations demonstrating multidomain implementations as well. It’s a subject we’re definitely going to be hearing a lot more about. Two other trends to watch: increasingly creative use of Siperian Business Data Director, and corporations turning to system integrator partners to gain value from MDM as quickly as possible. Our inaugural GOOEY Award winners were a clear indication on this score.
The winners, Cognizant and Wipro, are both Siperian system integration partners who have been leveraging Business Data Director to build viable and replicable business-specific solutions on top of the Siperian MDM Hub. Wipro has enhanced its Reference Data Management solution for banks with reject management analysis capability, which improves the quality of data within Siperian MDM Hub. Cognizant, focusing on data governance, added Business Data Director to its MDM-in-a-Box for Life Sciences solution, thereby helping its customers to reduce downstream data management issues and improve decision making by business users.
With 14 leading partners sponsoring the event, we received good feedback from both customers and partners on the structure, content, and speakers. Here’s to a yet another successful user conference!
The Siperian team is back in the office after attending the Gartner MDM Summit in Los Angeles last week. As usual, it was a great event for picking up on the latest developments in the field, meeting the analysts who cover MDM, and hearing from the organizations and endusers in the field who are using MDM to resolve their business challenges.
The topic getting the most buzz at the Summit was the shift towards “multidomain MDM.” We heard this from both analysts and vendors, and we were pleased to hear Siperian mentioned frequently in presentations as a vendor that “knows how to do multidomain MDM.”
Of the delegates I interacted with, and there were 330 in attendance total, the consensus was that the analyst presentations and advanced use cases from firms with MDM implementations were real highlights. Among these were case studies presented by Siperian customers Cephalon and Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson was also highlighted as a past Gartner MDM Excellence Award winner.
Some general notes from the conference:
• Gartner expects the market for MDM to grow from $1.1 billion (in license revenue) in 2008 to $3 billion in 2013.
• North America is still the largest market for MDM (over 50%) followed by Europe (35%).
• IBM, SAP and Oracle control 40% of the MDM market, while specialists like Siperian control 30%.
• Analysts are saying that there’s a “land grab” on for multidomain MDM, but most vendors have yet to span master data province.
Siperian news from the conference:
• John Radcliffe presented the CDI magic quadrant and mentioned Siperian as a “good best-of-breed company.”
• Siperian was recognized as a “multidomain MDM” player in the analyst charts, and was also mentioned as one of the top 5 vendors that can handle customer data.
• Siperian was named a “company to watch” for product data.
• Siperian receives the 4th most inquiries from prospects behind SAP, Oracle, and IBM.
• As a platinum sponsor, Siperian had 4 customer sessions and an evening cocktail session as well. For everyone who attended our events: Thanks!
Over the weekend note blogger David Linthicum did a blogpost on eBiz regarding master data management (MDM) and cloud computing. The crux of David’s argument is that while the profusion of cloud computing will exacerbate the need for MDM, the rush to embrace cloud applications could potentially drive MDM into the background at many companies. That, ironically enough, since organizations can save so much money by replacing big enterprise systems with lighter SaaS applications, in the headlong rush to embrace cloud applications “MDM will be an afterthought” and get pushed aside even as the need for it intensifies.
I agree with David that the migration to cloud computing is going to further spark demand for MDM, but I don’t agree that MDM is going to get pushed aside. The reason I make this argument is that we already have a few customers at Siperian who are using MDM with cloud-based applications, and it’s working out very well. These customers are combing MDM with the cloud in the following two ways:
1. Using MDM to create a single version of the truth before enabling the cloud-based applications (i.e., they’re cleaning up data from multiple in-house CRM systems, and feeding reliable, consistent customer data into Salesforce.com)
2. They’re combining customer and other forms of data from the cloud-based applications (e.g. Salesforce.com) along with internal CRM applications to create a single version of the truth to enable operational and analytical business processes.
As organizations grow the number of cloud based applications, they have to control the key data that they will use across those applications as well as internal applications and data warehouses. MDM enables organizations to do just that—either for enabling cloud-based applications or creating a single view of the master data across cloud-based applications and internal applications. Thus a strong foundation of MDM will be the key to successfully taking advantage of cloud computing.
A few months ago we blogged MDM for the Business Masses, where we speculated that custom data governance applications for MDM would be the next step to enable business users to directly create and consume master data. We saw further evidence of this through Dan Power’s white paper detailing how proactive data governance – MDM hub as a system of entry – would be the next wave to benefit organizations looking to take the next step in their MDM journey.
It is exactly with this in mind that we released Siperian Business Data Director (BDD), a configurable data governance application that provides an intuitive, business-user focused, and easy-to-use interface by leveraging the Siperian MDM Hub services and MDM solution components. Since then our customers and partners have been busy using BDD in a variety of ways such as integrating with custom widgets and bringing in data from sources outside of the hub so that business users can view everything from within a single user interface through the BDD.
At the upcoming Siperian Masters User Conference scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, October 20-21 at the Hyatt Regency, Princeton, New Jersey, there will be a session where some of the most innovative BDD configurations and integrations will be showcased. The best, as voted on by a panel of judges and the audience, will receive the first ever coveted Gooey Award.
This contest, apart from being fun and interesting, highlights the fact that the most successful implementations for MDM come from adaptable and configurable platforms that allow an organization to gradually extend their MDM deployments as their business needs change. Throughout their MDM journey, they can also learn and benefit from best practices encapsulated as MDM solution components (BDD specific or otherwise) thereby ensuring their success.
The recent blog post from Forrester Research analysts Clay Richardson and Rob Karel posed an excellent question around synergies between Business Process Management (BPM) and Master Data Management (MDM). Siperian customers have been at the forefront of driving these synergistic requirements that have made the Siperian MDM Hub uniquely suited for bringing together BPM tools such as Lombardi with MDM to enable data governance.
Together with the excellent points made by Clay and Rob, one of the trends we have seen is that most of the integration of MDM and BPM has been focused on the inbound – the creation of master data. But in the outbound – synchronizing master data (from the MDM hub) with downstream systems – BPM has been less leveraged or involved.
Inbound: While an MDM hub automates the merging of a large volume of duplicates, exceptions need to be handled by the data steward in "collaboration" with the data owner/ business user. Additionally, business users are starting to interact with Hub data directly as a “system of entry”, through interfaces like Siperian’s Business Data Director. Both of these inbound scenarios require a “chain of approval” and potentially sophisticated rules for process flow. A BPM tool such as Lombardi integrated with Siperian and leveraging the Hub’s ability to store states (transitional states of records prior to being finally committed to the hub). See a previous blog post The Art of MDM Workflow for more information.
Outbound: Downstream systems that accept the data from the MDM Hub can automatically receive updates through data synchronization. Once the master data is created or updated in the MDM Hub, it can place records onto message queues for EAI style distribution to systems such as CRM/ ERP, allowing those applications to have up-to-date accurate master data. Alternatively, periodic batch exports and updates using ETL can also accomplish this albeit in a non-real time manner. Typically, since there is no human interaction or complex process flow, BPM does not enter into the equation for such processing.
In summary, so far we have seen great use cases for using BPM inbound, not so much on the outbound side. What have been your experiences and do you have situations where you have applied BPM on the outbound?
A few months ago we blogged about how so many state-level governments are adopting legislation limiting or mandating disclosure of payments to physicians. This spend compliance is now top of mind for many pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
With their physician data spread across the enterprise among accounts payable, expense reporting, ERP, and CTMS systems, it is no wonder that many companies are struggling to conform to the ever stricter reporting requirements differing from state to state.
Not surprisingly, many are turning to Master Data Management as a way of gaining a unified view of physician data across these disparate sources. Many are also discovering that multidomain MDM solutions not only improve compliance but lead to increased sales. Through a single MDM hub they are now able to manage and track critical product master data elements, such as drugs, devices in addition to physician data, and the added quality, accuracy and relationships they uncover has allowed them to optimize and improve their business processes and resulting sales.
This intriguing topic certainly deserves more attention than our simple blog post. Which is why we are delighted to say that on September 24th, there will be a webinar panel moderated by William Looney of Pharmaceutical Executive magazine. Featured panelists will include:
• Hussain A. Mooraj, Vice President, Healthcare & Life Sciences, AMR Research, Inc.
• Anurag Wadehra, Sr. Vice President of Marketing & Product Management, Siperian
• Dan Goldsmith, Partner, IBM GBS
• David J. Eiben, Director, Business IS Consulting – PM Compliance, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
The event is free and anyone can register at www.Pharmexec.com/valuable.
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